Chris O'Connor (KACHIHRO)

As part of my new ‘kachirho’ company setup, I’ve purchased a new laptop – DELL XPS15 9550… It’s a beast with new SkyLake i7 6700 processor – and 16GB RAM – and 512 SSD – see here for a YouTube review. And it looks super-sexy with carbon finish…

It’s got the new (almost 4K) UHD resolution – 3840×2160 – and touch screen. The visuals on this resolution are amazing – BUT – the clincher is that you need to ‘up’ the font size scaling.

By default, it was set to 200% – if setting to 100% – it’s hard to read !

The next dilemma – and discussion with a colleague – was the scenario for a HYPER-V VM. I have one for some local development and working with K2.

Yes, I could use an Azure VM – but I have a local VM – so there…

While I can run a VM at decent speed, and with 10GB RAM, it’s not something that I can run on ‘multiple monitors’.

The next consideration, was to drop my screen resolution to 1920×1080 – to match the second external monitor. This WORKED – to a degree.

The VM would now pick up the base screen resolution (3840×1920) – within the VM – regardless of the desktop resolution I’d just changed to.

It turns out that HyperV must grab the base screen resolution – at BOOT time.

So – the answer was :

Change down from scale at 200% to 100% (I use 175% a lot of the time)

Drop the laptop screen resolution to 1920×1080

Reboot

Start up the VM

Connect – and tick the box for ‘span multiple monitors’

I can now run my VM across both screens – and both at 1920×1080.

It’s a fiddly way to do it – but luckily it’s so quick to re-boot, it doesn’t matter !